


The Circle Game

by amble_juice, EtherDragons



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Compulsory Heterosexuality, Emetophobia, Everybody Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Fix-It, If you count canon as a mishmash of book/series/movies, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Spousal Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mentions of Death, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Substance Abuse, but no actual character death because
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27164713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amble_juice/pseuds/amble_juice, https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtherDragons/pseuds/EtherDragons
Summary: The children on the lawnjoined hand to handgo round and roundeach arm going intothe next arm, aroundfull circleuntil it comesback into each of the singlebodies againThey are singing, butnot to each other:their feet movealmost in time to the singing.— The Circle Game, Margaret Atwood.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Past Ben Hanscom/Mike Hanlon, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 7
Kudos: 14





	1. we might mistake this tranced moving for joy but there is no joy in it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie couldn’t picture himself in Derry any clearer than he could any of his old friends. He couldn’t say if there was anything left of whoever that kid was in the adult he had become.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: substance abuse (prescription drugs), mention of suicide attempt.
> 
> [A song for this](https://open.spotify.com/track/3x7NGlfDKQYN2wnwEnL7r9?si=HvZkD_WpQ7-9AgFrFQPWZQ).

Time, as it always had, seemed to pass in a blur, words and half-remembered things clashing violently inside his head. Maine. He had grown up in Derry, Maine with six friends. The six best friends he’s ever had. And he couldn’t picture any of their faces with clarity, couldn’t force himself to remember any of their names aside from Mike’s.

Eddie’s hands shook as he opened up the bottle of pills for what felt like the twentieth time that day. Mike’s words rattled around in his head, words like home.

He needed to go home. Not to Myra, not to this farce of a household he had both desperately wanted and dreaded to live for nearly as long as he’d joined it. Home to the family that he had grown up with and forgotten, the one he had chosen and… lost. A foreign longing settled in his chest, on the place where he then became acutely aware had ached for as long as he could remember, but alongside it came a fear that stole his breath, unfocused his vision. Eddie hadn’t felt this small in a long time, so paralyzed. He knew that if he could only grasp at the memories just out of reach he would feel better than he’d had in decades, so why was trying to remember his old friends so crippling to him?

Phone calls and paperwork went in one ear and out the other for him, and he wasn’t even sure when it was that he managed to get to their house to start packing up his bags. Time slipped through his fingers like sand in a broken hourglass, only static and motion left in its wake.

The scar on his palm ached more and more the deeper he dug in his closet, folding and packing. Folding and packing. Toiletries grabbed. Packed. His eyes went over each pill bottle that he and Myra had. Eddie grabbed his last inhaler only to shake it and find it empty. No matter, he used to live in Derry. He could get a prescription refill there, maybe old Mr. Keene would even remember him, though he doubted it. It had been almost two decades since he left. 

Maybe he wouldn’t even be alive still.

Thoughts of change battered around in his head, far too fast for Eddie to grab a hold of any of them. It’d been twenty years and then some since he’d left, since they’d all left — would there even be anything left of who they were there? Would they even recognize each other?

Eddie couldn’t picture himself in Derry any clearer than he could any of his old friends. He couldn’t say if there was anything left of whoever that kid was in the adult he had become.

His throat was dry as he opened up Myra’s Midol bottle and took one or two, body working on an automatic pilot. He didn’t count, just knew he had a wicked headache that he needed to kick. He considered the handful of pills for a moment, then threw the rest of the bottle in the medication bag. Myra wouldn’t notice if one of them was missing and, even if she did notice, he doubted she would say anything. She always looked for reasons for him to keep taking his medication, whatever illness it was for that week, that month. He was a frail boy. A sick boy, a sick man.

Eddie’s palms got increasingly sweatier with each trip he had to take from his bedroom down to his car, past his wife who was asking him too many questions, too many damn questions that he didn’t have any of the answers to. Too many questions about a place that he just remembered existed no less than two hours prior.

A shared kiss, a lie, an excuse that left his tongue dry as a bead of nervous sweat ran down past his shirt collar to soak into the material of the polo he had changed into, each offered as a means to appease her every time he brushed past the marble statue of his wife on the way from the bedroom to the car and back. With one last kiss, hurried and unfeelingly pressed to a plump, wet cheek, he was out the door. Heading home.

Coffee burned his tongue on his way, scalding the roof of his mouth. His heart raced and he needed to turn on the radio. Some older songs, some that had always calmed him when he had a rough day. Songs that reminded him of the childhood that he couldn’t quite remember. A beat that he tapped out with his thumbs on the steering wheel, to keep himself moving while definitely going just a tad too fast on the highway, and the fear that had nestled its way into his chest, into his stomach, was laced with something else.

Hope, Eddie realized by the time he drove past the confines of New York City.

Hope that had been put there by Mike when he had heard his voice earlier that day - the kind of voice that reminds you that there’s something beyond the life that you had been burying yourself deep into year after year. 

The voice that Eddie knew that he needed to hear. 

Time kept passing him in a blur not dissimilar to the trees and posts outside of the car’s windows, too fast to keep track of it and when he least expected it, night fell and he was riding out of Bangor, another blink of the eye and he found himself still tapping his thumbs away on the wheel as he pulled up there in the parking lot of the Jade. He could just realistically back out and go. He could just go back to New York, to his wife, like nothing happened. He could go back like the scar on his hand never burned, like he never got the phone call from Mike in the first place.

Eddie thought about it, too. He thought about just turning around, forgetting the promise that he had made decades ago. His grip on the steering wheel tightened and he gave himself a slow, single shake of the head to rethink this whole thing. 

No. 

Something inside him, past the fear and the doubt, past the voice of his wife and his late mother telling him he was feeble and sick, was a feeling that he needed to be there. Was he supposed to be there for himself, though? For the scared little kid that still lived inside of him? Or for the others? For his friends that he had made a family with so long ago?

* * *

The answer didn’t come to him in that stretch of non-time between the car and the restaurant’s door, it still hadn’t when he took himself inside and told the kind hostess that he was meeting friends for dinner.

About halfway through his allergy list, carefully kept track of by counting them off on his hands, was when he saw Mike and Bill — his memories were still clouded over, the faces of his childhood friends hidden, most likely nothing like the faces he could see now, but the names still came as easy as breathing. His previously dull, almost hazed over eyes cleared at the sight of his old friends, and the question fled him entirely.

Then the memories come. Slowly, at first, wool lifted gently from his eyes, then all at once the moment Bill exclaims “Eddie!”. Then it hit him like a sack of bricks, Eddie sure that he would have toppled over with the sheer force of it if he hadn’t been standing properly. Around the blank spots still littering his mind, he remembers — remembers himself as a child, too young for the images to be anything but blurred by nature, and his only friend, playing in the backyard of his mother’s house. Remembers himself when he was to leave the city, huddled one last night pressed against one of his last remaining friend’s side, voice shaking with a kind of determination he couldn’t think of having ever since.

Eddie remembers, and it aches so deeply to think he had forgotten in the first place.

“Holy shit…” 

The wind was damn near knocked out of him again as Mike rounded the table to pull him into a hug that simultaneously crushed and comforted him, strong arms wound around his middle and nearly pulled him off of his feet. Bill came next, and Eddie felt like something had begun to stitch itself closed in his chest, but before he could properly examine whatever it was the room turned into a flurry of motion and voices when three more of them got in.

From there, it’s like a dam had been broken.

He was still trying to find his bearings when the six of them all sat down, and little by little the fog in his head that he had lived with for two decades was lifted.

Nearly nineteen years he had lived in this town. Nineteen whole years, just a little under half of his entire life, and it had all been carved away from his mind for some unknown reason and he had seldom given it a second thought before now. He remembered the house he grew up in with his mom that he took care of, the Aladdin theater that sometimes seemed to be the only real link to the outside world and what they were doing for entertainment, the arcade that they spent quarter after quarter getting tokens for. Henry Bowers and how much they were all tormented by him.

Bev brushed her hand against his arm as she reached for a dumpling, and the shockwaves of it brought back images of them at thirteen, huddled together, alone together at the Quarry and not talking about things neither of them wanted to think of but knew the other would understand without need for words, of soft touches and stupid adventures. Ben smiled at him from across the table and Eddie was hit by a hundred images of them pouring over homework together, the dusty smell of the library all around them, of quiet conversations and shared lunches. Richie looks at him… oh, Richie.

He felt it like an ache on his teeth how much he’d missed him without knowing. He remembered the days upon days of pouring over comic books Eddie hadn’t really been allowed to buy, of listening to songs together on the radio, Richie hurrying to press rec to save the songs he liked the most. Of knowing each other like the palm of their hands. How could he have forgotten his best friend, how could he have lived with the constant emptiness of not having him, not having any of them, how could he have not realized that was so until now.

Eddie felt his heart ache just a bit the more that he looked at the man over the empty seat between them, the empty seat meant for Stan. He kept intercepting the looks Richie gave to it, quick little glances that turned into some stupid joke or prodding when he realized Eddie had been looking too.

Waiting. They were all waiting.

Throughout the dinner they spoke, clipped conversations that always seemed to begin and end with a shouted, “do you remember—”, interspersed by laughter. Even when Richie brought out the mom jokes, jarring in Eddie’s mind the vague recollection of watching his stand-up and knowing it hadn’t evolved too far past that, he still laughed harder than he had in… since he’d left. The night leaves his face aching with it, like his muscles had forgotten how to tug themselves into smiles.

In the end, Stan never did show up. 

But, God, all the anxiety and fear that had threatened to swallow him up in the parking lot sure did. It even manifested. Those fortune cookies were bullshit. Panic rose in his throat as the papers were shuffled again, and again, and again. Their five voices were talking over one another too much, all throwing out idea after idea with the five pieces of paper they had pulled from the cookies.

Then Bev, who had been silent until then, put down the sixth piece of paper and Bill put it all together in a single line. A sentence. A sentence that drove silence through the room and drove dread into all of their hearts. An immediate weight dropped on six pairs of shoulders.

 _Guess Stanley could not cut it_.

Eddie felt like he was going to be sick. The feeling was heightened as one by one, the leftover cookies began to crack open and reveal what was inside. The background of unexplainable fear that had so far followed every new memory pulled like teeth from his unyielding mind finally manifested itself, and Eddie couldn’t find it in himself to be glad for the explanation because he was too busy being shoved between a wall and a fish tank and Ben’s body to avoid the monstrosities rising from the remnants of their dinner.

A half-developed chick, a goddamn bug with the face of a baby, an eye that never quite stopped looking at Richie. A bat wing that immediately made him feel itchy and disgusting. Bats carried diseases. Eddie couldn’t afford to get even more sick. He tried reaching for his inhaler out of reflex, but remembered that it was empty. Eddie could have sworn that the talking severed heads were new, but what did he know. 

He heard Richie calling out his name in the middle of all the mayhem, but couldn’t quite see him over the rise of Ben’s shoulder, couldn’t pay attention above the white noise in his head.

His eyes squeezed shut, and he did his damned best to help Ben fight off the goddamn disease-ridden bat wing in their space before a new voice cut through the sounds of screams, through the sounds of a chair slamming against the Lazy Susan in the center of the table that had previously housed their entrees and the offending desserts, through the panic ringing in Eddie’s head and his ears.

“... What the hell is going on?”

It was like the entire room froze, for a second. Eddie’s eyes shot open, and he peeked around Ben’s arm. The ringing in his ears slowly ebbed away, and the pounding in his chest slowed ever so slightly. Just enough to have him be able to hear his own thoughts again. While he was finding his voice, he saw Richie look over and, clearly being the first to regain his rational thought, speak first.

“Stanley?” With a voice so full of emotion it nearly choked Eddie.

Gently, his hand on Ben’s lower back, Eddie ducked under the taller man’s arm to make sure it really was Stanley. The cookies… The message was wrong. The fucking clown was wrong. It was wrong.

He moves to step forward, to cross the distance and greet his old friend as relief spreads through his body like he can tell it does for everybody else. The air is immediately lighter between the six of them. It only made sense for it to be Richie first, Eddie reasoned, something warm and quiet making a home inside his heart. It’d been Richie and Stan in much the same way it’d been Eddie and Bill before they were four, this felt right, the last puzzle piece falling into place. Eddie sees a nearby potted plant jostle a little from the sudden movement and he rolls his eyes. 

“Staniel the M--” Richie’s voice is cut off by a shriek that Eddie swears comes from anywhere but Richie’s vocal chords as one of the fortune cookies, the one previously terrorizing him and Ben, flies into the man’s face.

Just like that, Eddie watches as Richie trips over a dip in the carpet and falls backwards. His own back aches when the table immediately crumbles and collapses under the sudden stress. Not that it’s the table’s fault, though. It did just get the shit kicked out of it by Mike and a chair and, besides, the table was probably compromised enough with how old it probably was. It was bound to happen eventually even without Richie’s sudden weight on it.

Eddie glances to Stan, who takes a second to adjust his glasses and get a hold of himself after the assault via fortune cookie. He sighs in relief when he sees that, honestly, Stan is probably the most level-headed out of all of them.

“Hi, Richie.” The voice is unimpressed, but there’s a low-lying level of amusement within it as well. It’s enough to lighten the mood. 

Eddie assumes everybody’s relieved that, upon hearing Stan’s voice, they realize that he’s really there and they’re not all just losing themselves to It’s tricks and ruses. Stan is alive.

It’s then that the waitress comes in, and seven pairs of eyes all turn to her when her shaky voice asks if they need anything else and if everything is alright.

“Yeah,” a voice from the floor, muffled slightly by a tablecloth that had folded over and covered his face, rings out, “Can we just get the check? Please?”

Eddie moves, takes one step forward to help Richie up before he’s overtaken by Mike and Stan, both of which have the height and strength between them to help Richie off of the floor by taking both of his hands and pulling. 

Not that Eddie wouldn’t have been able to help, too… He’s just saying.

It’s then, to Eddie’s horror, that Richie immediately pulls the newest readdition to the Loser’s Club into his arms in a bone-crushing hug. Literally. He can hear the vertebrae of Stan’s back pop with the force of Richie’s arms around Stan’s tall, thin body and the way that he groans makes Eddie think that maybe the wind was knocked out of him for a second, too.

“You’re gonna make him need a chiropractor, Richie. Just that sound makes me want to go home and visit mine,” he says, though he can’t keep the bite out of his tone from the mere fact that everybody has officially gotten some sort of a hug from Richie except for him. 

But it’s fine. 

“Eddie,” a soft voice speaks up near him and he turns to its owner, “If you need a quick hug and back adjustment, I can try.” 

Eddie weighs his options. Ben is obviously well put-together. Clean. Not like they weren’t going to get absolutely filthy at some point, Eddie is sure of it. If the clown has anything to say about it, they’re all gonna be fucking neck deep in grey water sometime in the next forty-eight hours anyway. 

Besides… He missed Ben.

He had missed him terribly, Eddie realized. Had missed the gentle warmth that seemed to always accompany him, the quiet companionship that hadn’t required anything out of him, the wordless understanding.

God, how could he have forgotten?

“Sure,” he says, subtly lifting his arms from his sides as a small, welcoming gesture. 

He isn’t sure when the last time he got a real hug from someone besides when Mike and Bill had taken turns hugging him earlier. Probably years. Maybe ever since he’d left. He and Myra never really hugged, and he and his mom never really did, either. But the safety of feeling Ben’s arms around him, and feeling loved just like that is enough to ebb all of Eddie’s problems away even for just a moment.

And then he feels his back pop and crack in places that he swears didn’t exist until just then, and he feels a lot of his tension quickly leave his body. 

“I think you just reset my lumbar into the right place,” Eddie says, rubbing his lower back and even offering a small, dry laugh, “I needed that after driving up here.”

“Glad I could offer some assistance,” Ben said amiably, and smiled at Eddie, putting his hand on his shoulder. He glances to Stan, who he also quickly goes to for a hug, leaving Eddie there for a few moments by himself.

Eddie takes these moments to really look over everybody now that they’re all together again. Bev was right. Everybody really did grow into their looks. 

A soft smile tugs at his lips for a moment, and he’s thankful that they’re all cracking jokes at one another again once they all chip in to pay for the bill - that’s miles more expensive once the table, chairs, and dishware are all added onto it - and make to leave.

They’re stopped, by a voice far too young to belong to one of them, and they all turn. Eddie can feel the tension rising in all of them as they look down at a small child, one who none of them know, who just spoke Richie’s name.

“The fun is just beginning.”

Eddie glances to the others before his gaze is settled on Richie, who… Immediately grabs the kid by the arm and starts yelling at him. Understandable, considering just how on edge all of them really are. Eddie isn’t sure if he’s the first one to see the kid’s parents approaching, but his fear quickly turns to anxiety and disappointment as he turns his gaze back to Richie. 

It’s too little too late by the time he thinks to open his mouth. Richie’s already asking the poor, disturbed child fan if he wants a picture and Eddie’s left staring apologetically at the parents and kid as they walk further into the restaurant. 

He almost feels bad, but his attention snaps back to the Losers when he hears the fitful words leave Richie’s mouth as they’re all leaving. 

“It’s been three years, sorry I don’t remember material I didn’t write.”

Eddie’s a few steps behind, but he quickly takes a few strides to catch up, hand raised in an accusatory point, which he shakes at Richie and then at the rest of them while walking, triumphant.

  
“I fucking knew it! I fucking _knew_ it!”

* * *

The cold night air of Maine was calming as the seven stepped out onto the wet pavement. The wonders of being up north. Never quite dry, but somehow never really humid, either. It was comforting to Eddie, especially when he compared it to the heavy air of New York City. 

Eddie glanced at Stan, who had taken a few steps away from the group to dig his phone out of his pocket and answer it. He could faintly hear a feminine voice speaking to him, and the light of the Jade’s sign caught the gold band on Stan’s finger. The way it glinted was almost blinding.

The ring on his own finger became heavy at the sight, and at the calm way Stan spoke to his wife, the way he saw Stan’s eyes light up, he immediately knew that Stan’s ring didn’t carry a heavy burden. It didn’t carry the guilt of not being sure if you loved the person you were married to. It didn’t have the weight of a marriage of convenience. It still held its shine, and Eddie found himself wondering how often Stan took to polishing the piece of jewelry.

Eddie’s thumb twiddled with his dulled, golden ring. He turned it a few times subconsciously. Slipping it down his finger a bit, then pushing it back to the comfortable divot it had homed itself in after all these years. Maybe he needed to get it resized. A little looser. It always had hugged his finger far too tight for comfort, even though in truth the size of it was just fine.

“I promise I’ll be home as soon as I can, babylove. I love you so much. I do. I’ll be careful.” 

Eddie watched as Stan touched a wrist with his free hand, and it was only then that he noticed the bandages. He looked around to see if anybody else noticed, but it was clear that they had. Their gazes were locked onto them, only broken when Stan hung up and put his phone back into his pocket. 

The fortunes made sense all at once, and Eddie felt a heaviness in his heart that he shared with the others. A heaviness put there at the thought of them having almost lost a precious friend, a precious family member. 

“So that was your wife, huh?” Richie spoke up first, and Eddie didn’t have to look to just picture the shit-eating grin on his face, “... She hot?”

Stan paused, rolled his eyes with a long sigh, the weight of his irritation lost on the way his mouth twitched in a smile.

“Yeah, Richie. She is hot.” 

The levity of it all, the relief that came from hearing Stan call his wife didn’t last very long. They all had a burning question in their minds, and Eddie looked from Stanley, back to Bill, and his gaze settled on Mike. 

“Pennywise knew. It knew before we did,” he said and he backed up a little bit. Honestly, being back together with his friends was all well and good and he knew what they were there for, but what they would have to go through to do it… What they already went through. He wasn’t sure if it was worth it. 

“We have to stop It. I have a plan.” 

Eddie could hear the resolve in Mike’s voice, but he also heard the slight waver that came with it. Mike was scared, too. Why wouldn’t he be? He’d been in Derry all these years, studying It. He knew what It could do… What it would do if It got the chance. 

"It's not something I can —" Mike began, but Richie's voice rose above it. 

“I have a plan, maybe getting the fuck out of dodge!” High pitched and frantic, he lifted his hands, still in his pockets.

“People are going to die, Richie…” Ben murmured, not unkindly.

Eddie glanced at Ben, up at his eyes. They were determined, but Eddie could tell that Ben was just as scared as the rest of them. 

Richie didn't look. He kept going, with anxious little motions of his hidden hands.

“People die every day, man! It’s not about just us anymore! It almost got Stanley! It almost got him! While he was back at home! He has a wife! Bill has a wife, Eddie has a wife, this isn’t just about us anymore! I have —,” he was cut off by his phone ringing. 

Richie frowned, pulled it out. His expression smoothed over, and he chuckled quietly. "Right on cue, fucking psychic —" He turned his back to answer it. 

"Hey, sorry I didn't — Sandy? Sandy, slow down, I can't…" He paused. The almost earnest affection in his voice falls, replaced with a pale sort of fear. "Shit. No, I can't… I have to take care of some stuff here, I'll call — no, no, listen, just… go sit outside with them, alright? You know they like when you do that."

Another pause. Richie shifted, restless, and Eddie couldn't look away even though he had a clear feeling that he was intruding. "Thanks, darling. I'll be back as soon as I can, okay? Take care," he turned a little and Eddie caught a glimpse of his smile. Small. Private. "Love you too."

Richie ended the call, and put his phone back in his pocket with a sigh.

Eddie couldn’t hide his curiosity, something rough gnawing at his neck, “Who was that?”

Richie glanced down at Eddie and he chuckled, “I told you I got married, Eds.” 

He blanched, confused and something else. Richie had put his hands back in the pockets of his jacket already, and Eddie hadn't taken him seriously enough to look for a ring. 

He wondered if it was worn and heavy, like his, or well, lovingly kept, then he shook his head and decided it was none of his business and looked back to Mike, who was waiting for any sign that Richie wasn’t going to just pack up and leave. 

Richie returned the look for a moment before sighing again, turning his gaze down.

“... Look, Mike, just give me until the morning to think about it. I need a second to think about all this crazy shit. That’s something you can give me, right? Something you can give all of us?”

Eddie nodded, agreeing quietly with Richie. He needed some time to think about all this shit, about what it meant for them all to be there together. About what they needed to do. Fast. 

He could hear Mike behind him, pleading for them to just get it done while they still could, before anything else happened, but the pleads fell on deaf ears. 

The last Eddie saw when he got in his car was Bill, the last person standing there with Mike. But it wasn’t important. Eddie had some time to think now. Some time to think about whether or not a twenty-seven-year-old promise was worth possibly losing everything that he had… Possibly losing his friends, his family… His life.

Not that it had been much of one. Not really. Not like he now remembered it to have been — vaguely still, the blank spots still there, slowly stitching themselves closed the more they walked in the chilly Derry night towards their respective cars.


	2. you refuse to be an exact reflection, yet will not walk away from the glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie heaved a sigh, content with the thought that he wasn’t the only one to see, in the end, the novel concept of being in a group of people who _knew_ each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No major content warnings for this one.
> 
> [A song](https://link.tospotify.com/RlpE0EaqGbb).

It’s wildly impractical, but with the exceptions of Bev, who took a cab from the airport in Bangor, and Mike, who’d walked over from the library, both of whom jumped into Ben’s rental, they all drove their own cars to the same place. Impractical and wasteful to boot, although Eddie relished the window of time to just _think_ on all that had happened since he stepped foot in Derry.

Memories of the rotten house in Neibolt filled his mind, the missing pieces on the patchwork of his brain, putting the blinding fear into stark perspective. The house. The clown, the leper, the flute-playing woman. The things that had come after they left, the dull pain and the scar where he had broken his arm, where Richie had snapped it into place.

He thought some more on the question he asked himself on the way, driving on the back of the impromptu procession, behind Ben’s sensible rental and as far away from Richie’s obnoxiously red Mustang (who even rents a _Mustang_ to drive around in rural Maine of all places, Eddie kind of wants to smack him over the head for it) so he wouldn’t have to deal with the inevitable stress headache from looking at it. He thought, and he thought, mind filling with more and more pieces of time, snapping into place like they’d never been anywhere else.

Eddie thought, but he couldn’t find an answer still. Nothing beyond the certainty that he needed to _stay_ , in spite of the thinny voice in the back of his head (weirdly nasal, cracked, and high-pitched) telling him to _go_.

The Townhouse stood like most other places in this wretched town, decrepit but oddly unchanged. Eddie scowled at it as he stepped out of his banged up Escalade, wondering if anyone had bothered to clean it in the years since it had opened, whenever the fuck that had been. He was aware it’s a silly thought to have, all things considered, but if anything the reflex of disgust he got when his foot met the gummy rug by the door was kind of comforting.

They filed inside in a tense kind of silence, spurned on by Richie’s request for time, meandering over to the empty check-in counter, to the unmanned bar space beside it with its, frankly, uncomfortable looking couches and hard plastic barstools. A sudden shout the only warning Eddie gets to snap out of his judgmental staring at the mismatched collection of furniture and towards its source, Richie fucking _vaulted_ over the bar’s counter like he hadn’t just broken an entire table with his back, setting on to examining the dusty bottles lined up behind.

“You’re going to hurt yourself, dipshit,” Eddie shouted after him in a reflex, mouth working before his mind could catch up.

“I can handle a little fall, Eds,” he quipped right back, smiling so wide it almost cracked his face right down the middle, then turned to tug an ancient bottle of whiskey from its perch under a blown out lightbulb. “Hey, how does everyone feel about a repeat of Bev’s fourteenth birthday party?”

Eddie would swear he _felt_ Ben and Stan wincing somewhere behind him. His own memories of that day in particular were hazy, and likely not due to any paranormal influence.

Bev laughed. “I don’t think your strategy of filling the bottle back up with water is going to fly with the employees here like it did with your dad, Rich.”

“Bold of you to assume it did with him,” Richie turned and put the bottle down with a flourish, immediately going back for something else. “Didja know vodka _doesn’t_ freeze? I sure didn’t.”

“Have we not earned a little more class than stolen straight vodka out of solo cups?” Stan pulled out one of the bar stools besides Eddie, folding his legs under to tuck his feet into the metal rests. “Just a little more dignity twenty-six years later?”

“Apparently we’re graduating to…” Eddie gingerly picked at the neck of the bottle, turning it around to read its label. “... ambiguously acquired black label whiskey. Weird that there’s _no one_ here.”

“It’s not technically stealing if no one’s looking,” Bev offered, to the chorus of Bill, Ben and Eddie groaning back: “It _definitely_ is.”

She huffed out a laugh, dropping unceremoniously, and with a cloud of dust far too large for Eddie to not feel like crawling out of his own skin, into one of the least dirty-looking old couches. “Spoilsports.”

Ben shuffled closer to the no-man’s land of the check-in counter, rapping his knuckles against the wood. “I think we’ll pass, actually,” Eddie looked back in time to see as he motioned towards Bill and Mike with a jerk of his head. “Mike’s gonna show us his research notes.”

Bev booed loudly, at the same time Richie blew the world’s most straight-faced raspberry at them. Mike chuckled. “You guys are more than free to come with, you know. My place’s nothing to write home about, and I definitely don’t have enough couches for everyone, but it might help you make a decision about what we have to do.”

Stan shook his head. “As much as I’d like to have a sleepover, I’m good.”

“Yeah, man,” Richie didn’t even look back, just waved a hand over his shoulder. “I don’t need to look at whatever conspiracy board you’ve got hanging in your living room, I need five shots of whatever the fuck else is here and a good night’s sleep.”

Bev said nothing, only leaned her head back into the couch with her eyes closed. Eddie looked between the six of them, considering.

He had never been someone who shied away from information. In fact, he ate any sort of it up with the voracity of a starved man, scrambling to get as much and from as many different sources as humanly possible. The issue laid in that he then proceeded to spin himself into circles until all he could think about was his own impending doom, regardless of what he’d been researching (highlights of his late-night wikipedia deep dives included one _horrid_ time Eddie found himself spiraling about the possibility of being killed by a cow, while living in uptown Manhattan). He had no idea what the hell he would do if given the full talk about whatever research on sewer clowns Mike did over the past two decades, but it would most likely be awful for everyone involved.

So he shook his head, hopping onto a stool beside Stan’s.

“See you guys in the morning, then,” Ben patted Stan’s back, then Eddie’s shoulder, all easy smiles.

“We’ll come over and we can get breakfast at the diner?” Mike offered. “I promise it’s not that much better than it was back then, but they at least hired someone who can make consistently good runny eggs.”

If anyone aside from Eddie noticed how quiet Bill was, no one acknowledged it. He stood closest to the door even as the others came to say bye, hands clasped behind his back and a faraway look in his glazed over eyes. Eddie thumbed at the underside of the bartop, feeling the grain of the wood as he fought against the urge to get up and… do something.

He wondered if Bill had forgotten Georgie, as they all had, and in the same breath decided he’s never going to ask.

Instead, he felt the need to at least provide some small comfort to his old friend. The feeling of the wood wasn’t grounding enough and Eddie got up anyway and crossed the small room to Bill for the last time that night. He gently touched his arm, recognizing and empathizing with the small jerk that came at the sudden attention-grabber.

“We’ll see you tomorrow… okay?”

 _We’ll be here tomorrow_ , he wanted to say, _we’re finishing what we started, we’re with you_. But that was too heavy even for now, so Eddie only squeezed at Bill’s arm and hoped this part of their friendship hadn’t been forgotten, that Bill could still listen to the words he couldn’t say like he did when they were toddlers.

Bill looked at him, and for a moment it was like he was looking right past Eddie, before he deflated. The promise seemed to at least calm him a little, the quiet promise that they would all at least be there in the morning no matter what they chose after that. A promise not unlike the one they’d made twenty-seven years prior, and Eddie knew as it sunk in that, despite the fear, they would all stay to hear Mike out.

As his shoulder was gently touched and grasped in return, Eddie gave a nod and a slightly melancholic smile before going back to the stool he’d adorned only moments ago.

The three of them left without much more preamble, Bill squeezed between the two taller men with their arms around his shoulders. Eddie heaved a sigh, content with the thought that he wasn’t the only one to see, in the end, the novel concept of being in a group of people who _knew_ each other.

Then Richie produced an even dustier bottle from somewhere underneath the counter, four glasses that Eddie immediately snapped at him to wash before he even dared to pour anything out, and they fell into a strangely familiar rhythm.

* * *

Over the course of the night, Richie had abandoned his post behind the bar to occupy the stool on Stan’s other side, and by the time they each were about three and a half drinks in, the two of them had drifted close together.

Eddie watched as Richie all but fell forward forehead-first into him, one of his hands clasped on both of Stan's. Memories overlapped over his vision like deja-vu, tens of hundreds of other moments of easy tenderness they seemed to reserve only to each other. Likely something about how they'd been by each other's side since before either could remember (clown fuckery notwithstanding), the same kind of easiness that came between Eddie and Bill and no one else, brother-like, of little boys who had leaned too close too young to know it wasn’t how boys should act with one another and could never quite shake the habit even after learning it, ingrained in them as it were.

He couldn’t hear their sparse conversation. Richie’s mouth moved occasionally, some words here and there rising because he’s never had a great control of his volume, and he felt like intruding by paying too close attention.

Eddie gently rapped his fingertips on the underside of the bar, only to make a face and put his hand atop the surface instead when he barely grazed an unfortunate lump that he’d only encountered on the underside of diner tables. People who sat at the bar were adults, could adults not throw away their fucking gum?! His nose scrunched and he took the dustier of the bottles that Richie had dug out, pouring himself a glass of the unknown liquor to take a swig as he glanced at Bev, who had taken a cigarette out for herself.

His eyes drifted to the telltale indent of where a ring had previously been seated, before shifting to meet the mismatched green and grey of her eyes. He remained quiet, but shared a knowing look with her. A marriage that wasn’t quite for her, he supposed. She never did talk about her husband at the dinner table earlier that night. Not much, anyway. She had directed the conversation away every time.

Much like he had when Richie asked if he got married to a woman.

Why was that the question? Was it surprising that he got married to a woman? It’s what was expected of him, wasn’t it? Of men his age. Eddie was plagued with the questions in his own head about why, instead of answering Richie’s question, he’d simply gotten annoyed and said a simple “fuck you”. Why had he even asked that in _that_ tone, anyway, being married himself. To a woman named Sandy, who he called _darling_ in a voice that rang like she hung the moon each night. Stupid.

“Heavy in your thoughts, Eddie?”

Eddie’s eyes lit up again when he met Bev’s gaze again and he chuckled, sipping his drink.  
  
“Yeah,” he answered and he nodded, “There’s just… a _lot_ to think about. With all of this, with all of you. We all forgot, Bev. Why did we forget? How did we forget? This whole thing, all of us, this isn’t just something that fades, you know?”

Bev sighed. There was something to the set of her mouth, to the way she took a drag from her cigarette. Something familiar, almost, the sense of words trapped in her throat, things she was unwilling to voice.

Eddie pushed himself off of his stool, and sat heavily on the loveseat besides Bev. She twisted away from him, switching hands to light her cigarette and hold it away with the same kind of consideration she had spared him as a teen. He considered telling her that the smell and the smoke never bothered him — which, honestly, should have been an indicator that he did not have asthma, not then and not now — and that even deep in adulthood, the smell was somewhat of a comfort, when he caught a whiff of it on the streets or floating around the clusters of coworkers gathered outside, circling a trash can as if it were a campfire.

He didn’t. He liked that she remembered to do this, liked the fuzzy memories that come with the silent care she offered him, nothing stifling or overt. Silence hung between them as he settled by her side, arms pressed together like they sometimes would back then, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the Barrens.

They both watched Stan and Richie like they would then, too. Looking over as their friends swam and played in the water far, far below, just blurs of motion and shadows against the reflection of the sun. Not really paying attention to them as much as reminding themselves that they were part of something good, even when not with the others.

Bev put out her cigarette, lit up another one. Smoke curled around her wrist, between her long, thin fingers, the meticulously kept nails with chipped red polish. A purple-blue bruise bloomed like a flower half hidden, half exposed with the way the loose long sleeve of her blouse slipped down with each motion to bring the lit smoke to her lips and over to the ashtray again.

Eddie looked away, burning in barely contained, bitten down anger, and strained to remember how she had put it, once, their watching. Something about how she wished she could bottle that feeling up, to bring home after sundown. A little thing to remember when it was dark and cold in an empty, unwelcoming bedroom.

"I didn't," she broke the silence after a while. It didn’t startle Eddie out of his thoughts as much as it felt like the natural flow of their conversation.

“Didn’t you?” Eddie turned his head a bit, brushing his cheek against a lock of red hair. It’s odd that she kept it this long, he mused.

Bev met his eyes for a moment. The discolored iris on her left, a matching pair to Stan’s own, seemed to catch the light overhead, silver. “Ah,” he breathed out, at the same time she declared, “not really,” with the sort of finality that told him not to press.

She turned away, lifting the half-smoked cigarette back to her lips. Eddie let his head fall on her shoulder. The weight of the day, and all of the drinks they’d had, seemed to be catching up to him. He rubbed his cheek into the sharp jut of her shoulder and took one last swig from the thing that he’d say, if pressed, probably was cheap bourbon, before letting the glass rest on the little table Bev had left her empty glass and the metal ashtray.

He had only settled down fully when Richie came ambling towards them, eyes red and squinting behind the thick lenses of his glasses. _He did grow into them_ , Eddie thought, then looked away, burning in curiosity.

(Richie’s hands are back in his pockets, now. He wondered if he and Stan were catching up on the decades they’d lost, if Richie was telling him about his own wife. He wondered where in the spectrum Richie fell, if he had found someone that made him happy. He seemed fond enough on the phone, but so was Eddie, wasn’t he? Fond. Comfortable. That’s not the same, he mused, unsure.)

Not giving a shit about Eddie’s drowsiness nor the moment they were having, _nor_ the fact that the loveseat very much could not accommodate three people comfortably, Richie sat on the arm by Bev’s side and wiggled his shithouse body until she moved, squeezing himself into the nonexistent space and nearly throwing Eddie off over the side.

“What the fuck are you doing, asshole?” Eddie snapped somewhere halfways through the ordeal, reaching behind Bev to smack Richie on the head when his only answer was to laugh and wiggle more. “Fuck off!”

“Love you too, Eds,” Richie blew him a kiss, earning him another smack to the head. “Hey, Molly, you got some more where those came from?”

“You’re a bona-fide celebrity, man, and you’re still gonna bum smokes?” She rolled her eyes but reached into her jacket all the same, and Eddie felt a little vindicated that she dug her elbow into Richie’s side hard enough to make him yelp.

“Well, excuse me, I hadn't smoked in a while,” he twisted away, snatching the pack from her hands. “And you’re a _bigger_ celebrity. You gotta help us poor souls dying in the C-list.”

“You can just buy a pack in the gas station before meeting your friends and possibly the incarnation of childhood trauma like everyone else.”

Richie, in lieu of replying, just stuck a cigarette between his teeth, motioning at Bev until she sighed and slapped the cheap plastic lighter into his open hand.

“Smoking is bad for you, dipshit,” Eddie grumbled. “If you stopped you shouldn’t fucking pick it back up just because.”

Richie looked at him, the cherry-red tip of the cigarette reflecting sharply on his glasses. “I didn’t see you give Bev the shovel talk, dude,” smoke poured out of his mouth thickly as he spoke, curling like curtains around the frames of his glasses.

“Watch it, _I_ don’t fucking smoke for a reason, I don’t need you giving me secondhand carcinoma,” Eddie grimaced, waving a hand in front of himself.

“Don’t you live in fucking New York? Betcha your lungs are raisins by now,” but he blew the smoke away from him all the same. “Y’know, pollution and shit. It’s a wonder a little neurotic thing like you didn’t move somewhere like, I don’t know, fucking Idaho to escape that. They don’t have tax auditors anywhere else?”

“I’m a _risk analyst_ , asshole, I don’t work for the fucking IRS and I _know_ you know that—”

“Not that I don’t _love_ being in the middle of a true Tozier-Kaspbrak shoot out,” Bev interrupted, snapping Eddie’s long-winded reply right down before he could get really into it, “but where did Stan go?”

Eddie looked towards the bar and, true enough, Stan wasn’t there. Or anywhere to be seen, really. An edge of panic began to cut through his chest in the split second it took Richie to take another drag and reply.

“Upstairs. I think he’s Facetiming the missus or, I don’t know. Tuckering in like an old man,” he shrugged, rolling the cigarette between his thumb and middle finger.

“Pot, meet the fucking kettle,” Eddie said. Or tried to, because half of it was consumed by a loud, treacherous yawn.

"Come again, Eds?" Richie reached over to flick two fingers against the shell of Eddie's ear, retreating before Eddie could retaliate. "I don't speak whale, what the fuck was that?"

"Shut the fuck up," Eddie struggled to reach around Bev and slap at Richie's head again, the taller maneuvering over the arm of the loveseat and out of reach with a snorted-out laugh. "How are _you_ not tired?"

"'s all the coke I been doin’," Richie crooned, dipping into a Voice that sounded eerily like Al Pacino. "Wouldn' _cha_ know, Wall Street?"

Bev sighed. "I'm getting another drink," she pushed with her elbow into Richie's shoulder, earning herself a muffled 'ouch', and nearly flung Eddie out of the couch, again. "It's really starting to feel like my birthday all over."

"Not until Spaghetti here falls asleep on the floor, it isn't," Richie put out his cigarette and grinned from ear to ear, like an asshole.

Eddie, deliberately toed his nice shoes off, swivelled around on the couch, and kicked Richie in his smug, wide grin. He knew that he would later chastise himself for reacting that way, especially after over twenty years of toning down the ever-present anger that was settled in his chest. Twenty years of not messing with the natural flow of things, with the status quo that was set. Thrown out the window by Richie’s stupid face.

“Put a sock in it, asshole.”

Richie yelped, squirming against the edge of the couch with a hand raised and ready to bat Eddie's feet away, and suddenly it was like no time had passed at all. He laughed, delighted, almost tasting the dusty and humid air underground, the slanted sunlight filtering in through the slits of the wooden ceiling. Eddie then hooked a toe under the edge of Richie's glasses and flung them over the back of the loveseat.

"Dude!" Richie shouted, in the same moment Bev broke out in an uproar of laughter. "Are you shitting me? I didn't bring my spare!"

"That sounds like a _you_ problem," Eddie kicked at his shoulder for good measure, relishing in the silliness of his flailing. Eventually, Richie threw his head back in defeat and Bev swooped in, picking his intact glasses from the floor and gingerly placing them on his face.

Bev chose to avoid what had now become a war zone, sprawling herself on the armchair across from them instead with her glass of whatever they’d been drinking and a fresh cigarette. Eddie stretched his legs out over Richie’s lap, feeling a little too doozy to bother pulling himself to sit up again. Belatedly, he berated himself for drinking on his pills, but he’d… forgotten about them. Both the ones he’d taken before the drive and the small pharmacy in his bag.

Richie pulled him right out of whatever epiphany this line of thought was leading him to when he leaned forward to snatch the pack and lighter from Bev’s hands, leg jumping under Eddie’s calves. He kicked halfheartedly at his ribs, grumbling, “Sit still, you muppet,” and burrowed a little further down on the loveseat.

“Stop kicking me, fucking gremlin,” Richie pinched his leg hard enough to sting, but stopped moving all the same with his hand resting, warm and comfortable, over his ankle. Eddie hummed quietly, satisfied, and let himself drift off to the sound of Bev and Richie discussing something — red carpets, maybe? Something about Netflix. He didn’t try to follow it.

He’d be woken up later to Bev carding her fingers through his hair and Richie offering to throw him off the couch or carry him up, and he would hop off in drowsy anger to snap at Richie because he’s well capable of going up to his room by himself, and proceed to do just so, rattling off complaints at them for letting him get a crick in his neck. But now, on the cusp of falling asleep on an unfamiliar, dirty couch with Richie’s fingers tapping a random rhythm into the sliver of skin between his socks and where his pant leg had ridden up, Richie’s and Bev’s voices droning on softly on the edge of his mind, he just feels… like home.

 _It’s for them_ , Eddie thought, the surety in the words warming him to his core. _I have to stay for them. For us._


	3. we found the trenches they had been making, fortified with pointy sticks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunlight streamed in from the opening above him, shining over the discarded, rotting remainders of their childhood. He could see everyone but Richie examining the place, roaming around their ancient clubhouse with something akin to awe settled over their shoulders, tinting the quasi-silence with it. More and more memories flooded the forefront of his mind, from the lazy afternoons after school where they’d all pile up on a blow up mattress Bill had dragged out from his house, scrambling off of it when the hole on the side had made it deflate enough that they could feel the uneven wooden slabs that made up the floors on their backs.
> 
> “Hey, Eddie,” Stan called, looking over his shoulder. He had picked up a tin can from one of the dilapidated shelves, the label on it stating ‘SHOWER CAPS’ in his neat, straight handwriting, “remember when you broke Ben's paddle?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Emetophobia, drug abuse mention, past child abuse and spousal abuse, mentions of death/dying, internalised homophobia.
> 
> [A song, for you.](https://open.spotify.com/track/4qphu7qSHCrzsNDgHDPPHL?si=iwa7VXURRZKfgRTR64wVKQ)

Morning came, and for some time Eddie almost forgot it was supposed to be a dreadful one. He was startled awake at nine to the noises of something heavy falling and breaking in the next room over, Richie’s voice punctuating the catastrophe of his own making with a very eloquently put together string of colorful curses and then the sound of someone — probably Stan, if Eddie didn't misremember the layout of their rooms for the night — punching at the wall for him to shut up.

It was comfortable, well-treaded ground; the pathways to how they used to fit together as children, as teenagers, stealing time right out of the mouth of damp summers and bitter winters, the memories of their rare sleepovers so entrenched in his mind now it was like they were never gone in the first place. The added walls were new, where before they’d pile up together in the Denbrough’s living room or Richie’s bedroom or the Uris’ basement, but the way Richie yelled a cheery, vaguely British " _top o' the morning_ " to Stan wasn’t.

Eddie made it halfway through his morning routine before Bev woke up, bursting into his room, and plopped herself down in his bed.

“D’you remember the time we climbed up that big tree by the Kenduskeag to throw pinecones at Stan and Mike?” She questioned with no preamble. Her arms were spread out above her when he looked, splayed out over the itchy blanket and tapping unrhythmically at the worn wooden headboard.

“It wasn’t pinecones,” Eddie answered stiffly, not daring to move his face too much under the constricting layer of the face mask he’d spread across his cheeks. “It was acorns.”

Bev frowned, squinting her mostly blind, silver-grey eye more than the bright green one, nodded sagely. “You’re right. Where the fuck would we even have found pinecones?” A pause, then: “Okay, but do you remember—”

Eddie kept going on the methodic rhythm of his morning, the conversation not as much an interruption as it was background noise, filling the stale, mildly mouldy air between them as he padded back and forth in the bathroom and to his bag, counting pills while she stared at the ceiling, unseeing or pretending not to see.

They carried on, trading memories until they felt like sea glass, clear and well worn. Until he had to gently kick her out so he could take a shower, even under her muttered assurance that she’d absolutely not look, until the feeling of having slept in an unknown bed and an unknown couch beforehand started to make his skin crawl.

When he finally emerged, feeling satisfyingly clean and sufficiently tranquil, it was for a few more moments of peace. To Bev and Stan trying to recount two different perspectives on the last (and first) Hanukkah they’d all been together for, piled up together on the fifth day in Stan’s backyard, with Richie spouting random bits of a third opinion from his sprawled out perch on the loveseat, head and feet hanging off of either arm and arms spread out like the world’s hairiest, loudest afgan.

Eddie considered for a moment, and ultimately didn't dare drop himself in the loveseat again. Not only because that would make him have to sit on Richie’s chest — deterred only by the fact he’s far heavier now than he was at fourteen, the last time he remembered doing it — but mostly because under the sunlight streaming from the windows he could see the water damage stains on the fabric and the sight sent a chill of disgust so violent through him that he almost went back for another shower. Instead, he sat on one of the stools by himself, content to just exist in their general vicinity.

It couldn’t last long.

* * *

The sense of calm remained through Mike, Ben and Bill’s arrival, stretched over the length of their drive — in only two cars now, divided between Eddie’s Escalade and Ben’s sensible SUV after a considerably short and altogether not _that_ loud shouting match between Eddie and Richie because the latter wanted to go alone in his _fucking_ Mustang that had no business being in rural Maine to begin with — and all the way over their breakfast.

It was tenser, in a way. Mike clearly couldn’t bring himself to relax, and even though Ben and Bill fell more easily into step with everyone else, they too seemed like they had too much in their minds to stop them from holding their bodies so tightly wound. They ate mostly in silence, with sparse conversations in-between long stretches of it because they couldn’t stay fully quiet all together now any more than they could when they were young, reminiscing about whatever fleeting memories came.

It was tenser still when Mike took the wheel of Ben’s rental and told Eddie to follow. Somber, even, in a way almost akin to a funeral procession, as they turned down overly familiar streets to an extremely familiar stretch of woods.

The walk was silent most of the way there, eyes all focused on the fallen leaves and, in Mike’s case, keeping himself grounded by kicking them to the side every once in a while. How many times had he taken this walk alone now? How many times in the last two decades had he been caught in his own head and found himself here to reminisce and study and just… Miss? He’d lost track after the first fifty trips. Hell, he was surprised the ground on the way was no more indented from his trips than it had been when he was left alone.

Ben took the helm of their group after a while, stalking determined to a spot in the middle of the clearing that, at first to Eddie, was no different than the rest. Yet, when he looked more closely to where Ben was standing, he could see the peek of dark wood, darker than the soil around it, peeking from under the overgrowth. He lifted his head, his hand on his hips, as he stood near the trapdoor to the clubhouse and looked at his six friends. The grass around the wooden slab, rotted over in places, looked like it hadn’t been touched in years, and Eddie felt the stretch of the years more acutely now than he had since the Jade.

With a spare look thrown to the rest, Ben took a step forward and slammed his foot down on the ancient trapdoor, sending it down with a dull thud and the creak of the hinges. He shrugged at the quizzical look Mike gave him, “I doubt the hinges are still functional,” he offered in response, “besides, it’s not like it was ever really rainproof, was it?”

Mike shook his head, the ghost of a smile on his face. “Yeah. Come on.”

He walked past Ben, hopping down the opening. Eddie winced at the sound of the old wooden stairs complaining under Mike’s weight, worry crowding behind his teeth with no time to be spat out because Ben followed close behind, then Stan, then Bill.

“Come on, dude,” Richie prompted, laying a heavy hand on Eddie’s shoulder as Bev disappeared into their clubhouse as well. “You can come after me, if this shit doesn’t break then it ain’t gonna with you.”

Eddie swallowed the impromptu rant about how _that’s not how structural damage **works** , Richie_, choosing to take the comfort as it was. Richie almost ruined it by jumping down without using the _fucking_ stairs, then again when he yelled “I’ll catch you if you fall, Eds,” with a shit-eating grin on his face, like _he_ was going to risk the integrity of his joints with such a dumb fucking stunt.

He grimaced as soon as his feet met the floors of their clubhouse, a fleeting thought spared to his poor shoes he’d blown half a paycheck on before the _feeling_ of being down here settled.

Sunlight streamed in from the opening above him, shining over the discarded, rotting remainders of their childhood. He could see everyone but Richie examining the place, roaming around their ancient clubhouse with something akin to awe settled over their shoulders, tinting the quasi-silence with it. More and more memories flooded the forefront of his mind, from the lazy afternoons after school where they’d all pile up on a blow up mattress Bill had dragged out from his house, scrambling off of it when the hole on the side had made it deflate enough that they could feel the uneven wooden slabs that made up the floors on their backs.

“Hey, Eddie,” Stan called, looking over his shoulder. He had picked up a tin can from one of the dilapidated shelves, the label on it stating ‘SHOWER CAPS’ in his neat, straight handwriting, “remember when you broke Ben's paddle?”

Eddie blinked, torn between the instinctual urge to fight ( _I didn’t fucking break that shitty paddle Stan, you broke it—_ ) and the overwhelming joy of remembering. “Yeah.”

He moved to inspect the spaces between the flooring, squinting at the shadows.

“Holy shit, is it still— wait,” Eddie dropped to his knees and stuck his hand down between two pieces of wood, the fabric of his coat catching on the rough edges. He dug around until he found something smooth and round, pulled the paddle ball up with a triumphant laugh.

Stan rolled his eyes and looked back down to the shelf, putting the tin can back in its place. “ _Now_ you find it.”

In a stroke of youthful spite, Eddie cradled the ball carefully between his pointer finger and the tip of his thumb. “Hey, Stan,” he called. When Stan looked his way, he flicked the ball out, hitting him right between the eyes, “fuck you.”

Behind him, Richie laughed so loud and sudden that Eddie almost fell over.

“Eds gets off a good one!”

Eddie felt the warmth in his chest spread through him, and he couldn’t hide the smile that tugged on his lips. He’d always liked making Richie laugh. In the same way that, he supposed, Richie loved making all of them laugh. The joyful sound made the clubhouse feel even more like home, much like it always had back when they were younger and looking for an escape that never quite came anywhere else.

But they all knew that they weren’t just there for the good times. They turned to Mike as he cleared his throat, hand was on the nearest support beam, and he looked at Bill. Bill sighed, sitting gingerly against another one of their makeshift shelves.

“... Okay, Mike… tell us. What are we d…d-doing here?”

Eddie watched as Mike looked to the five of them, and they all waited for him to speak up. Eddie felt a chill run down his spine when he did, quickly subduing the warmth he’d felt only moments before. Something told him he wouldn’t be feeling that warmth again for quite a while now.

“We needed somewhere safe to talk. I figured this was probably it, the best place to explain the plan, since it’s always been somewhere that we were all together in, and nothing… nothing ever happened to us in here," Mike paused, looking down. "It has been focusing on us. This entire time. I—I don’t know why. I'm not sure.”

Eddie’s eyebrows furrowed as he watched Mike flounder around for words. Both Ben and Bill stepped closer, as if to offer support, and he began speaking again.

"I've been trying to figure it out, stayed to figure it out. Unsurprisingly, there's not a lot of reliable information about children-eating clown monsters in the public knowledge," Mike chuckled, running a hand over his hair. "But out of everything I've managed to find that fit the bill at least a _little_ , it all pointed towards these kinds of creatures attacking indiscriminately, and rarely ever breaking out of their cycles, but I've been monitoring It and — and it's broken both rules."

Mike paused again, ran his hand over his face like he was in pain. "We — _I_ think it might have something to do with Bev and Stan."

“Why would they—” Eddie started, only to get cut off by Bev’s soft voice, heavy with guilt and dread.

“The Deadlights.”

Eddie's mouth snapped shut so fast his jaw clicked.

“Exactly,” Mike continued, “I think that since Stan and Bev saw them and _survived_ , they became connected to It. Then we did the blood oath, linking the rest of us to the two of them, and — and to It. I couldn't find anything like _this_ in any of my research, so that was… all I could think of in terms of _why_ It is targeting us and… possibly our loved ones.”

By his side, Stan made a strangled noise, and when Eddie looked up he'd stumbled back into the shelf, sending the tin can of shower caps clattering to the ground. He'd turned pale as a sheet, eyes glazed over with what was, unmistakably, sheer terror.

"How can you be so sure we're linked to It?" Stan choked out, holding on to the shelf with so much force his knuckles were turning white.

"Our, your memories. This isn't something that happened to anyone else."

"We tested it," Ben interjected before anyone could ask the obvious follow-up. "After we realised what was happening, my — my mom wanted to move back to Austin," Eddie remembered that. He remembered that by the time he had been ready to leave, Ben and Arlene had been packing their entire house up as well, set to leave by the end of the year. "I told her I wanted to stay. She left, and she didn't forget."

"How'd you even figure the memory thing?" Richie asked. He'd been so quiet, standing hunched over in the shadows, that Eddie almost forgot he'd been there. "I—we thought they were busy. Or fed up."

Mike tilted his head. "Eddie."

"Me?!" Eddie squeaked, straightening up. What the fuck had he done?! He just left, feeling sorry for himself about his oldest friends leaving him behind, clutching at a fierce promise to not do the same to the two remaining that he'd later break.

"The last letter you sent me," Mike's voice softened, "a month after you left. That tipped us off that there was something… wrong."

Eddie didn’t argue, but he frowned, struggling to remember. He couldn't, ultimately, and there was no time to linger too much on it because Mike kept going, gesturing wildly with his hands the deeper into it he got.

"I figured that regardless of that, it would still be better if we fought It now. It's been twenty-seven years, the beginning of a new feeding cycle, and since It's so focused on us, we might… we might be able to kill It before It has the chance or, or the inclination, or _whatever_ , to try and kill anyone else. We can stop It before it makes a meal out of anyone else, we can cut this off before anyone goes missing again, it’s as good a shot as we’ll ever get."

"So we're gonna be lambs to the fucking slaughter then?" Richie chuckled, cold and sardonic. "Fucking great. And we can't even fucking leave because this mother fucker is gonna keep following us? 's that it?"

Mike nodded. Richie laughed again, pacing behind Eddie.

"Fucking _wonderful_. Couldn't have told us about this shit yesterday, Mikey? That we oughta stay regardless? Fuck, man," Eddie looked back while Richie ranted, aching to reach out and stop him.

"You can — you _could_ leave, if you wanted," Mike spoke, his voice so small it was more frightening than anything else he'd said so far. "Honestly, I didn't even dare to hope you'd all come. You can leave, we… I can take care of it."

Stan shook in place, from the tip of his toes to his head, violently. Eddie felt himself rooted in place, crouched down where he was. Richie paced, back and forth still, the frantic _thump thump thump_ of it echoing in Eddie's chest.

Bill settled it. "No," he said, tone leaving no space for discussion. "We made a p…p-promise we'd come back to finish t-this. We can't just g…g-g… leave now."

Bev and Ben nodded, even though Bev retreated further back into the Clubhouse, arms wrapped tight around herself and mouth pressed into a thin, pale line. Richie barked out a laugh and Eddie knew that if he looked back he’d see him with his lips pulled over his teeth, dog-like and angry, but Richie said nothing. Even now, even though they’d grown older and out of things like friend group hierarchies, still they would all follow Bill’s lead, wherever he led them to.

“You have a p-plan, right, Mikey?” Bill motioned for him to continue, and no one dared to interrupt. Mike blinked, stunned for a moment.

“Y-yeah,” he rubbed his hands together, stepping out of the sunlight. “It’s… we need to lure It somewhere. It won’t show Itself to us like It did before, not when we’re all together like this,” Mike paused, wringing his hands, restless. Then: “We need bait.”

“Bait?” Richie quipped, dropping himself heavily on the ground besides Eddie. He threw an arm over Eddie’s shoulders. “I nominate Eds.”

“What the _fuck_ , asshole?!” Eddie shoved at him, tipping off to the other side so far he almost fell on his ass. “Go fuck yourself, what the absolute hell are you talking about?”

Richie’s smile faltered, and he opened his mouth to explain — or, more likely, to spout some more bullshit —, but before he could get any words out Bev called out, “beep fucking beep, Richie,” from across the room and he rose both hands in the air, muttering something about ‘lighten up’.

“Not _that_ kind of bait. It’s… more symbolic than that, I suppose. We’re dealing with a nightmarish, possibly mythical creature, it’s not straightforward,” Mike shook his head. “We need to find things that, ah, represent our fears? Tokens of things we were afraid of before, and that we’re still afraid of now. If we can gather those, they should have enough—enough emotional weight, so to speak, that It’ll come out to feed on us.”

“Then what do we do? We put ‘em under a cardboard box with a stick and wait until It crawls under?” Richie started, grunting mid-sentence because Eddie then elbowed him in the gut.

“Shut the fuck up, dude,” Eddie hissed.

Unbothered, Mike continued. “That’s pretty much it, actually? I spoke to the few remaining members of a native tribe that used to live here before the settlers, and they had a… ritual, that they used to stave It off of their people when It woke. It’s called the Ritual of Chüd and, well, it’s supposed to bring It’s true form to where it’s performed,” he paused, throat clicking audibly in the stale silence. “It’s our best shot.”

Mike looked across the Clubhouse with something akin to desperation in his eyes, earnest, like he was still waiting for them all to leave. No one moved, and he breathed out, eyes shiny even in the dim light.

“Alright!” Mike clapped his hands, smiling so wide. “Where to first?”

Silence, for a moment. Richie opened his mouth but, surprisingly, Bill spoke first: “You want us to g...g-go together?”

“Yes?”

Eddie did _not_ want to have company in whatever this fear-searching journey would entail, and it seemed like he wasn’t alone in it. Bev stepped even further away from the group, and Stan balked at the thought, raising a hand to cover his mouth like he was about to be sick. Besides him, Richie rose to his feet, and all of them watched as Bill and Mike stared off against each other, knowing, with the surety he seldom had anymore, that they’d all do as Bill did.

A second stretched into a minute, into two, into eternity, the six of them holding their breaths in the freeze-frame of Bill's frown.

“We’re weaker separated, Bill,” Mike shattered the silence, the smile gone from his face. “It’s safer if—”

“I know,” Bill murmured. “I know it’s safer, but… I think we still should. Do this by ourselves,” he ran a hand over his face, turning his eyes down. “We weren’t together the whole time back then, either.”

Mike had nothing to say. Not to Bill, not to the following murmur of agreement that swept through the Clubhouse, with the exception of Ben — Ben stepped behind Mike, laid a hand on his shoulder and Eddie saw rather than heard his mouth curl around the words, “I’ll go with you,” and he felt shame rise in his chest. Not that it changed his mind. It was just… _there_.

One by one, they climbed up the rickety ladder and out in the late-afternoon air, silent. Mike and Ben walked off together, Ben with his hand still on Mike’s shoulder. Stan went on their tails, then Richie with his hands shoved so far into his jacket’s pockets that the lining poked out under the bottom. Bill set off in the opposite direction, a hand gripping tight at his own hair. Bev looked at Eddie for a moment, then she disappeared off the edge of the clearing as well.

Eddie shivered, missing the earthy warmth like nothing else, and set off, too.

* * *

Eddie left the pharmacy, digging out the inhaler from the bag that it was unnecessarily put in. He shook it, almost to make sure it was actually filled, before he put it in his jacket pocket. He was on edge just thinking about the fact that they needed to somehow find tokens of their past, something important. His hand fiddled with the inhaler in his pocket, flipping it over and over in his fingers. He popped off the cap, popped it back on, popped it off, popped it back on. He walked. There was apparently a carnival in town. Boy howdy, he didn’t want to see any damn clowns yet. Not yet.

His eyes remained on the pavement in front of his shoes for the most part, and his steps were brisk, hurried. Eddie wasn’t even sure where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to even collect anymore. His first thought went to the inhaler in his pocket, but that couldn’t be it. The inhaler, his medication, that had been a part of his life forever and, while it really defined his entire childhood and his adulthood, it didn’t mean that it was his token.

 _Find what you’re afraid of_ , Mike had said. _Were afraid then, are afraid of now._

If not sickness, even the ones that only live in his paranoia, if not the looming, all-consuming shadow of his mother’s facsimile of love, if not death, then what is Eddie Kaspbrak afraid of? He popped the cap of his inhaler back on, twisted the wedding band around his finger with a thumb. He knew he must be afraid of so much, but it all can be traced back to that, and it doesn’t feel right. Not quite.

The semi-dilapidated house came into view in the corner of his eyes while he walked, and he stopped. His heart became heavy at the sight of his old childhood home in front of him when he turned to it, and he took his inhaler out to take a deep breath of it. It calmed him, stabilized his anxiety. Most of his life had been spent in this house. In his room.

His prison.

The steps creaked beneath him as he stepped up onto the porch and he wrung his fingers, looking down at the door handle. It had rusted. He looked at the glass in the front door. His reflection looked back at him, practically begging him to come inside one final time. For closure.

The year was 1994. The October wind was biting cold as a young, eighteen-year-old Edward Kaspbrak stepped into his home and closed the door behind him.

The air was stagnant. It always seemed to be that way. Stagnant and yet sterile. His mother never wanted to have the windows open, since it could let insects and germs in and harm his immune system.

Despite being a legal adult, Eddie was very much still underneath his mother’s thumb, and he greeted her with a gentle kiss on the cheek before he went up to his room.

Richie had been gone for three months now. Three months, and Eddie hadn’t heard a word from him. None of them had. It didn’t sit right with Eddie, that Richie would just up and cut all ties after leaving Derry. Not that he could blame him, though. Eddie had been planning on cutting all contact from most people once he left. But not with the Losers. Not with his chosen, found family. He could never just do that to them.

He had already lost Bill four years ago, when he and his parents piled up in their car and drove away, ran away from the memory of Georgie and the town that took him. Had lost Stan, two after that, and Bev way back when in the summer after the worst summer of their lives, and their absence felt like a wound, infected and growing. None of them had written.

They had lost them. It wasn’t fair of Eddie to hoard this strange grief to himself because he knew, despite the fact Bill had been his first friend ever, despite the fact he’d known Stan since they were all snot-faced seven year old playing in the backyard of the Denbrough’s house, despite the fact he had spent far too many afternoons that crept into night sitting side-by-side with Bev in their Clubhouse with only the shared dread of coming back home to accompany them, he couldn't say that he alone had lost them.

Richie, though. That was all his.

They weren’t each other’s first friends but they were each other’s best. Inseparable. And he had _promised_. Richie had bounded down the steps after delivering perhaps the worst valedictorian speech Eddie had ever heard in his life (a fact he was much too satisfied in telling him) and shoved a folded up piece of paper into his hands, squeezing them around it with the kind of look in his eyes he almost never got, far too earnest for his face, and promised he wouldn’t disappear.

Richie’s absence was all his, and it ached like a torn limb.

Eddie went to the desk in his room, lifting the piece of paper up to look at it. It housed Richie’s new address. At least he had this. He had this, and the mere thought that he had the opportunity to contact his best friend still drove him to sit down at his desk. He pulled out another piece of paper and grabbed a pen, and he began to write.

He wrote, pressing the pen hard into the paper as he went along.

He asked why Richie had forgotten about them, why he hadn’t written, or called. Why all of a sudden none of them were important enough to occupy a second thought in his mind. Why he had abandoned them… Abandoned him.

He wrote about what had been happening in Derry since Richie left, which wasn’t much with just him, Mike, and Ben left. But they had at least been keeping up with the Clubhouse maintenance. None of them had applied to college yet. None of them could bring themselves to do so.

Sonia was thrilled about it, anyway. It meant that Eddie could remain home for a little while longer. Her Eddie Bear wasn’t going anywhere.

He missed Richie. His stupid laugh and his jokes, his crooked smile. How, when he got taller, he took up so much of the damn hammock but still somehow found a way to have room for Eddie to be in there with him. He wrote about how he thought about him every single day, about how he would continue to do so because that’s what friends did when they missed each other.

By the time that he was done, the letter was four pages long, and Eddie folded and tucked it away in an envelope that he refused to seal. He wasn’t done yet.

He grabbed a blank tape, and his radio, and he sat there on the floor of his bedroom with it on what had been their favorite station. With the tape in, he sat for hours and recorded song after song on the tape, writing down the list as he went.

Eddie only got up when he heard his mother calling him to dinner, and he went down to eat with her, dissuading her from asking too many questions by acting like he was fine. Like he hadn’t been tearing up or crying at a couple of the songs that hit him too hard with the sensation that Richie was now missing from his life.

Dinner passed quietly and Eddie softly excused himself once he and his mother were both done and he washed up for the two of them, heading upstairs to finish up the tape. Just one or two more songs would be enough. He already had nine songs. He didn’t want to make it any longer than it already was and, besides, waiting for the perfect songs to add was already hard enough.

He sat, cross-legged in front of his radio once more, fiddling with the antennae to make sure it picked up the station properly before he stopped when he heard a voice from the speaker.

“Eddie…”

A chill ran through his body and he stopped, looking down at the piece of technology in front of him. He laughed nervously and he continued fiddling. No, he’d heard that wrong.

“He doesn’t even miss you, Eddie-bear. Why are you doing this?”

“Mom?”

Eddie looked to the door of his bedroom and then back to the radio. Why was he hearing his mother’s voice in the speakers?

“Richie wasn’t good for you, Eddie. He always roughhoused with you! I told you to stay away from him when you were little. Why didn’t you listen to your Mommy, Eddie?”

“Mom, I don’t… Richie was — is my best friend. He’s my best friend, Mommy, I can’t just.”

“ **Forget about him.** ”

The sound was suddenly garbled, the voice having layer upon layer to it now. It was no longer just his mother’s voice. He could hear himself in there, too. He sounded like he was drowning.

“ **Forget about him, like he forgot about all of you.** ”

“No.”

“ **You never mattered to him, anyway. Why would he bother sparing a second thought to a sick boy like you, Eddie? Why would he bother wanting you as his friend anymore?** ”

“Stop it.”

“ **No phone call, no letter… It’s almost like he’s _forgotten you exist_. Who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t choose to forget someone as worthless as you, Eddie? Sick little boy with his sick little thoughts, you’d only make him sick too.**”

Eddie pressed both hands, pressed tight into fists, on both ears, squeezed his eyes shut. The garbled voices kept going, louder still, like they were reverbing inside his head.

“ **Sick little boy, you’re lucky you have your Mommy to care for you. No one would choose to stay if they had the chance to go, can’t you see? As soon as they could they left you to die, you poor little weak boy, no one’s going to miss you** —”

“No! Goddammit!”

Eddie stood, kicking the radio hard over and over again, as the layered voices laughed at him. Laughed at his pain, at his struggles. The tape deck popped open and the mixtape fell out at a particularly hard kick, and he fell to the floor to grab it.

“Eddie-bear?”

Eddie’s head whipped around to the source of the voice, to his mother in his doorway.

Adult Edward Kaspbrak now stood where his mother once had twenty-two years ago, and the dread in his chest seeped back in. He never did send the letter or the mixtape.

At least he knew where he had kept them both.

Eddie sighed and he moved the rug that the previous owners of the house put on the floor, kicking it so it rolled up and exposed a hole in the floorboards that apparently hadn’t been fixed yet.

A small, almost unseen smile tugged at his lips as he knelt down there and he began to pull. The rusted nails gave way easy, and let him lift the loose floorboard up to look underneath it. An envelope was taped there. Sealed.

Richie’s name was still legible on the front of it.

Eddie sighed as he tugged it off the wood and looked it over, feeling it in his fingers. The tape was still tucked inside, too, and a wave of nostalgia came over him as he thought more about it. The songs on the tape… The same songs that had comforted him for years now.

He held the envelope over his heart, keeping it close to him for a few seconds. He had been such a coward back then, back when he didn’t send the letter like he should have.

With a shake of his head, Eddie put the floorboard back in its place and he stood, pocketing the envelope and feeling the weight of it comfort him. He stepped out of his childhood bedroom and went towards the stairs before he stopped as he heard a voice coming from his mother’s bedroom.

“ _Eddie-bear, is that you?_ ”

“... Mommy?”

_“You did come home… I knew you would.”_

No. No, his mother was fucking dead. He knew she was dead, buried in Bangor in the same cemetery as the rest of her family had been.

But his feet took him to the closed door, anyway, and he swallowed a lump in his throat before he spoke.

“Mommy, is that you?” He was crazy. He was fucking crazy, he knew he had to be.

“ _Eddie, dear…! Open the door and come give your mama a hug. I’ve missed you so much, Eddie._ ”

Eddie’s hand shook and moved as if on autopilot. His free will was screaming at him from the inside, telling him to get out of the house and get back to the hotel so he could meet up with everybody again. But the prisoner inside him remained, as it always had, and forced him to move, to open the door.

The dust that came from inside suffocated him, feeling more like he was drowning in the dust and memories of his past than anything else. He waved his hand to dispel the dust, coughing quietly and taking a step in, towards the bed that was occupied.

“What the fuck,” he whispered harshly to himself, palms sweating.

He ran his fingers over his palms as he approached the bed, eyeing it cautiously even as he reached out. His hand hovered over the comforter, and he felt sweat on his upper lip, eyes darting nervously from the blanket to his hand. He was begging himself to not touch it, to just leave it be. Just leave it be.

From the silence around him, he heard the shuffling. The groaning.

Eddie turned around, and fell back on the bed as he came face-to-face with The Leper. He screamed, and he scrambled to cross the bedspace, kicking the whole way as he was grabbed at. It took all his strength for him to stand up once he had the opportunity, and he ran to the one place that he knew was safe.

He ran to his bedroom closet, and he crouched as he held the double-doors shut in the same, panicked way he squeezed his eyes shut. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be fucking real, he wasn’t a kid anymore! He wasn’t a child, his mother was dead, he had been brave once upon a time, so many years ago! What happened to him?!

Eddie’s eyes shot open, and he remembered the little kid he once was back in 1989. He remembered the Eddie Kaspbrak that stood up for himself and his friends in the face of adversary. Not just against the clown, against It. But against people like Bowers, too.

His childhood fears couldn’t haunt him forever. He knew that they couldn’t. So, he steeled himself and he stood.

He threw open the closet doors, and wrapped his hands around the leper’s throat to switch their positions and push him against the back wall of the closet, of his former safespace.

“Fuck you!”

The words left him easily, and he glared at the shrinking leper. He could feel it choking, he could feel it dying in his hands and it only drove him further. He could do it! He was killing it!

“Fuck y--”

As his mouth opened, he felt and saw black sludge leave the leper’s mouth and shoot into his, covering him in it. It was only then that he let go and backed up, eyes blown wide with a newfound fear. That was fucking disgusting.

“What the _fuck_?!” he shouted as he turned, taking the stairs two at a time on the way down and out of his childhood home.

He didn’t turn back as he quickly shuffled his way down the street, away from the house that had been falling apart for two decades now. It was a miracle that he hadn’t fallen through the rotten floorboards.

He needed a fucking shower.

* * *

It's easy enough to find it, her house.

Bev had been gone the longest, but she still saw it occasionally — in dreams bathed in silver light, dreams that faded fast and only left a dull ache behind her eyes, in her gums, like her teeth would rot and fall off if she as much as tried to grasp at the fleeing images. She saw the impression of white walls and the rusty fire escape, the rows and rows of tiny, identical windows like a baker’s dozen eyes watching as she came back from school, from the Barrens, boarded up with thick metal bars. The pain came now, or the phantom memory of it, as she stared up and into the window to what had been her bedroom once.

The building looked rotten, like it hadn’t been inhabited in centuries. Where it’d already been dilapidated and old when filled to the brim with people now was outright falling apart. The white paint had peeled off to reveal the crude brick insides. Vines crept up the sides and were seemingly the only thing supporting the bottom of the fire espace, the top laying almost perpendicularly, long ripped away from the walls and broken down. Way, way up, a light flickered in one of the windows. Bev couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the sunlight or something else, laying in wait, and it frankly didn’t matter. A shiver ran through her body regardless, unbidden and unwelcome, and she rubbed her hands over her arms to chase it away.

With practiced ease that came to her like riding a bike and a good dose of newfound carefulness, she clambered up the metal steps, black flakes of it peeling out under her shoes. They moaned loudly under her weight, but they didn’t crumble, and that was good enough for her, taking it two steps at a time to give it as little reason to make the ascent any harder.

Her window never had the metal bars, only the faint indentations of where they were supposed to go or had gone someday. The glass panes are broken and, judging by the smoothness of the remaining glass around the frame, had been for years. She gingerly wiggled the biggest of them out of the putty keeping them up, throwing the shards over her shoulder until she could finally slip in through the hole without risking scratching herself.

The first step inside the room filled her with a wave of nausea so intense she almost stepped right back out, ritual be damned. She had never needed a clown or any of Its bullshit to remind her to be scared of her own house.

The air was heavy with ancient dust and mold, and very little of the late afternoon sunlight found its way inside in spite of the broken window with its rotted curtains providing no cover. The wallpaper on the walls was relatively new — it definitely wasn't there twenty-seven years ago, but what must have been garish floral patterns were now a bloated, nearly unrecognizable mess of black mold and water stains.

Bev took a step inside, then another. The carpet underneath her shoes squelched gruesomely with every move, saturated with presumably years of being exposed to the weather, to whatever pipes must’ve blown in the piece of shit building. She strained her eyes to see if there was still any evidence that she had existed here one day, but there was nothing. Just the disgusting wallpaper with lighter spots where someone might’ve hung shelves or frames once upon a time, and the carpeted floor, ruined beyond recognition, the wood panelling underneath peeking out of the more worn sections of it.

She tried to find the spot where her bed would have been, where in the walls she had hung her own posters, her own things, but there was nothing and even the memory of it slipped through the cracks around whatever lingering clown bullshit was there in her brain, although she knew she spent enough time trying not to think about this place before that.

As it stood, it was like she’d never even been there. Every trace of her at thirteen, erased. Forgotten, like none of it had ever happened. Thrown out, not missed.

She shivered again, prodded at a bruise on her arm just to feel the warmth of pain shoot up.

Hopefully not _every_ trace.

The room darkened quickly, far too quickly if she were to stop and think about it, but it was a blessing, if only because she wasn’t forced to see what exactly was underneath her as she dropped to her knees in front of a section of the baseboard — _this_ she’d made sure to imprint into her mind with as much clarity as possible before it was robbed anyway.

With scurrying noises in the distance Bev refused to think too much about, she gently dragged her nails along the raised line under the shoddily glued wallpaper, feeling for the gap she knew was there. The tip of her pointer caught and sunk into the rotting florals, scratched roughly against wood, and she smiled. Then, it was only a matter of prying it away. The wood came free easily enough, vaguely damp against her fingertips. Bev threw it away over her shoulder and immediately dug in, patting the decaying, ancient panelling.

Tucked carefully inside was a ziplock bag. She grasped at it with a kind of relish she’d seldom felt since leaving this room, this city — the cheap, teenage thrill of a secret very well kept. The plastic was damp, but when she closed her fingers around it the folded papers inside crunched dryly, and she let out a relieved breath.

She sat back on her haunches, dragging the bag out. She didn't need to look to know what was inside, but she still held it up to the light all the same, thrilled. There was an old, half-empty pack of cigarettes, a shiny silver zippo Richie had stolen from a gas station for her after declaring that she needed something better than the cheap, disposable ones, two tubes of bright red lipstick, some notes she’d wanted to keep, passed around in classes when the teachers weren’t looking, Richie’s chicken scratch and Eddie’s neat writing and Bill’s flowery words. Folded up beneath everything else, the postcard, its words burned in the back of her mind.

Beverly slowly rose up to her feet, something warm and familiar coiled low in her stomach. Standing in one of her childhood bedrooms, she felt like… rebelling, somehow. Like leaving her mark in a place that has all but forgotten her, too. She didn’t bother putting the wood panelling back in its place. Instead, she dug into her pocket, pulled out the newly bought, unopened pack of Winstons and, almost as an afterthought, opened the ziplock to fish out the zippo, relishing the feel of the dry, cold metal on her hand.

She held the cigarette between her teeth, holding the flame to the tip until it caught, illuminating the air around it in a warm orange glow.

The voice came as she breathed out, smoke clouding her vision. Bev hadn’t heard it in ages, was sure it couldn’t _really_ be him…

"Bevvie…"

She froze all the same.

It was rough, low. A voice that needed to crawl out of a throat ravaged by a habit of chansmoking that had started far, far too early. Cold enough to chill her to the bone, body wracked by another violent shiver that almost made her drop the cigarette, hollow and _loud_. It rang like a bell inside her suddenly empty mind, echoed in the room until she felt like she was surrounded by it, by him.

“Bevvie, _dear_. You’re back,” he continued, heavy footsteps echoing alongside the words. She could almost taste the rancid smell of alcohol sweat on the back of her tongue, gagged around the phantom feeling of it. “My darling. My precious, sweet little girl.”

 _He’s dead_ , Bev told herself. _He’s dead, he’s been dead for twenty years and some change, he’s_ dead _, he’s not_ here _._

The steps sounded closer still. They stop, briefly replaced by the deeply familiar sound of empty bottles being kicked away, clinking as they roll down the corridor, and they start again. Closer, closer, _closer_ , and her entire body locks up, teeth clattering together so hard she could swear something cracked in her mouth. The doorknob jiggled, and in a rush of panic so sudden and so _familiar_ , Bev thought about throwing her body against it, to keep it shut, and remembered it would be useless all in the same breath.

Because it didn’t matter. It had never mattered, anything she could do or had done never made a difference because Al Marsh would step into her bedroom regardless of what she did then, as he did now.

There was no light to frame his silhouette, nothing to make his features any clearer, but Bev still saw. It was like the darkness had coalesced thicker around him, a shadow of a nightmare of a man stumbling through the door with the gait of someone who’d never been sober before. Bev’s body finally responded to the frantic pleas of her brain, and she stumbled backwards a step, two, only to freeze when he spoke again, voice like nails on a chalkboard.

"Are you still my little girl, Bevvie?"

His smile shone, detached from the rest of his face. Yellowed teeth, crooked and chipped. The door swung open the rest of the way, knocked against the wall with a crack. The fading sunlight caught on the buckle of the belt wrapped around his hand, on the gentle swing of the leather against his thigh.

Then it wasn't Al anymore. Tom's voice rang clearer, but no kinder.

"Fucking _slut_ ," he spat. The belt swished, cracked against his leg like thunder. "Thought you could run? Thought you could leave and what, _be free_? **You are mine, Bevvie.** "

There was blood on him. Bright red, running down the side of his head, at the height his brow should be, defining the sharp edge of his cheek, the slope of his chin. The closer he got to Bev, the more of him she could see.

The face shifted with each step, his — their? — head jerked violently once, twice and it changed completely. It was Tom, then it was Al, Tom again, every time faster until all of it was a blur of motion and faces melting into each other and that smile, wide and sharp, predatorial and altogether too full of teeth.

The words melted together, too, until it was nothing but a cacophony of their voices, rising and rising and rising, ringing in her ears until the only words she could make out through the tidal wave of insults and threats, above the thunderclap of the belt against his thigh, are —

" **You — are — _mine_ — Bevvie.**"

One more step, and the terrifying amalgamation towered over her. The stench of stale alcohol in his breath brought tears to her eyes.

He brought the belt-clad arm back, ready to strike, shrieking: " **Mine, mine, _MINE_ —**"

Half panic, half something else spurred her limbs to move. The cigarette, forgotten, had all but burned to the filter. The cherry-red tip still shone in the dark when she brought it to the amalgamation of men that stood in front of her. It caught like straw, its skin melting around the quickly spreading ring of flame. It still moved, still screamed with the borrowed voices of dead men. The belt struck her arm, leaving a red welt among the bruises already there, and she winced but did not falter.

The metal of the lighter was warm in her hand when she picked it up, when she lit it. She could only imagine how warm it became when she threw it, the damp carpet catching fire far too fast for its state. Bev didn't stick around to see if the shifting figure continued droning on, continued screaming her name.

She turned and clambered out of the window, then down the fire escape as the room lit up in flames.

Bev spared it no second look, heaving out greedy gulps of air as she ran down the street, wanting nothing more than to meet up with the rest of the Losers in the safety of the Townhouse.

* * *

The freedom ran through his auburn locks as he pedalled, a grin planted firmly on his face as visions of his childhood danced in his head. The wind against his face, cold and crisp in the autumn air, so unlike the hot air of that fateful summer, drove him through the streets and the gentle, sloping hills of Derry.

Finding it had been a surprise, to say the least. Even now, the memory of what had happened to his childhood bicycle was hard to grasp at — Bill only knew they’d moved to Portland without it. If his parents sold it, or if just got left behind in the move doesn’t matter, because it ended up in the shop for a _ludicrous_ amount of money he’d pay five times over if only to run his hands reverently over the rust-speckled metal frame, finding the grooves where he’d carved its name with careful fingertips, to steal one last ride on it, one last taste of the overwhelming sense of freedom it had once brought him.

His fully grown body was probably too much for Silver (the vaguely Richie-like voice in the back of his head mockingly pointing out that he _hadn’t grown that much_ promptly ignored), but he pressed on anyway, just feeling the familiar way the bike swayed under his weight with each pedal while he chose to do anything but sit down on the bike seat. While he looked around his old childhood town, he realized that nothing changed. Nothing had really changed in the long run. The theater was still there, the pharmacy, the bridge, even their old school. Everybody’s houses still stood, dilapidated or not, they were still there. It almost brought him a sort of comfort.

He sighed quietly as he stopped his bike in front of the windows in town, looking at himself and, in an instant or two, he could picture them all there alongside him, kids who had their whole lives ahead of them as long as they stuck together, kids who had forged their bonds in the fires of the pit of Derry, the pit that nobody aside from them truly believe it could exist underneath the facade of a quiet, calm town.

The smile on his face slowly faded as he looked away, knowing that the look on his child self’s face was so much more determined, so much more assured than it was now. The look of a child that had seen too much but had an air of duty around it as well, one that said that they knew what they had to do, and back then that much was true.

But now?

Now, Bill was unsure of himself. A leader, supposedly, but also a self-imposed coward. He sat and heard what Mike and Ben had to say, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to step down and tell everyone else that they needed to stay together, too afraid of what they’d see — not what he would see of them, never that, but what they’d see of _him_. If what he had to chase would… make them see him differently. If it would make them lose whatever little faith they still have that he could support them, that he still deserved their eyes on him, waiting for his decision.

His palm stung against the handlebars, sweat prickling at the back of his neck. Bill shook his head and remounted on Silver, a sinking feeling lodging itself in his gut as his feet and his hands moved automatically to propel him forward, over the sloping hill. Something _else_ was driving him through the streets now, almost out of his own volition.

It was something more deep-seeded. Bill knew where he had to go, what his true fear really was, what had controlled him and never quite let go. Unfinished, the effects of it gnawing at his heels even when he forgot the cause.

His old house came into view as he pedalled down the street, and he stopped his bike there at the curb like he had so many times before, standing there with one foot on the pedal and one firmly on the pavement. He glanced up to his childhood home, and he felt his knees shake slightly at the view. It was the same… After all these years, the outside was still the same even though he had his doubts that the inside was. He could still see it.

The linoleum tiles in the kitchen, the posters in his room, his desk, his mother’s piano in the living room, his father’s tools in the garage, the backyard with its big tree and the tire swing, the dark, damp basement that had always scared Georgie.

Georgie.

His sight blurred as he looked up at his old bedroom window, and he could almost see himself standing there as a child, on a rainy day that wasn’t supposed to be any different than any other familiar, rainy day in Derry, Maine. He’d let Georgie go outside on his own that day because he didn’t want to play… He hadn’t wanted to play and as the memories came back to him, he felt a feeling that hadn’t wracked his body in such a long, long time.

Guilt.

The guilt that he had been the one to cause Georgie’s death, and the guilt that he had been the one to drive his parents a little too far in their grief while they were in Derry. The reason that they moved in the first place was because he sent Georgie out alone and he kept trying to find a solution, kept clinging to the unrealistic ideal that Georgie was somehow still alive. Still alive in the sewers of all places.

As if he’d ever be able to survive down there in the first place.

Yet his friends had gone with him all those years ago, had stuck by him and had almost always made sure to correct themselves if they slipped up by saying Georgie was dead. He didn’t deserve friends like that back then. He didn’t deserve friends like Eddie, Richie, and Stan. And yet… They had always stuck at his side and indulged him through thick and thin. Through the grey-water, the Barrens, the Neibolt house. They’d stayed with him, listened to him, even the words he hadn’t spoken, even the deep-seated fear that maybe he’d go into the house in Neibolt street and wouldn’t return, the desire he couldn’t look at that maybe he didn’t _want_ to.

Bill refused to linger in those thoughts for too long, instead sighed and got ready to pedal off again, but then.

“Billy?”

He heard it. Painfully, gruesomely, heart-wrenchingly familiar, and he stopped. His mouth dried around the word, tongue slipping against his teeth.

“... G...G-Georgie?”

Bill looked around, all sense thrown to the wind as he dismounted his bike completely, tossing it aside with the same carelessness he had as a child, and bolted down the street, heedlessly chasing his voice.

“C-Come on, Georgie, t-talk to me,” he said to nobody in particular, out in the open. A false sense of hope lodged in his chest, one that he remembered feeling all those years ago every time he went searching. It was back, and he couldn’t do anything about it now that it had its clutches on his guilt-ridden heart.

“Billy, come help me!” He responds, and Bill feels like he’d die if he stopped.

His steps picked up as he continued walking down the direction he’d seen Georgie go all those years ago. In the back of his mind, his senses told him to stop. To turn around and to just go back to the others to ask them for help and for security. He knew it was a trick, knew It used Georgie against him then, what would stop It from using him now? He knew, he _knew_.

He couldn’t stop himself.

He jogged, panting and looking around desperately as Georgie called out to him again and again, begging for help, begging to come find him because he was hurt. He needed his big brother. He always had, and Bill was going to be damned if he was going to leave Georgie alone again.

His back met the pavement hard, shoes having slipped on a couple of wet leaves there on the side of the road, and he grunted and wheezed, trying to get air back into his lungs for a few seconds. He squeezed his eyes shut and bared his teeth, hand on his stomach while he struggled and rolled over so he could push himself up onto his feet again.

At least, he would have had he not come face-to-face with the storm drain when he turned his head to the left, eyes widening as he saw two tell-tale lights there in the darkness of the drain. It wasn’t human, there was no way it could have been. But it was accompanied by a familiar yellow of a raincoat long lost. His hands and knees scraped against the rough pavement as Bill all but crawled towards him.

“... Georgie?” he asked and he shifted, dropping to his elbows, to look into the storm drain.

“Help me, Billy…” Georgie sobbed and Bill saw him reach out, desperate for his older brother again.

Bill lost his senses, then, looking into the eyes of what was supposedly his little brother, and he reached down into the storm drain. He knew, he knew, he knew with the certainty that accompanied the bone-chilling shivers of wrongness wreaking havoc down his back, but he _couldn’t stop_.

“Grab my hand!” he pleaded, reaching in further and tensing as he felt Georgie grab it. And then another hand at his wrist, and another. Smaller, bigger, cold. Climbing, nails digging into his wrist and arm and elbow, ripping his sleeve and further still, the skin below.

The hand on Bill’s disappeared. His fingers wrapped around a piece of paper instead, wet and cold and smooth, somehow still intact after all these years. In the darkness he couldn’t see the words scribbled on its side, but he seldom needed to.

S.S. Georgie.

He clung to it and he pulled, struggling. The cold hands had found their way onto his shoulder, blood dripping down where they ripped the side of his forearm to shreds on the way. He squeezed his eyes shut, as if that would help, dug his heels on the street and _pulled_.

Bill felt his feet slip, the grip he had on the top of the storm drain with his free hand compromised after he’d already fallen in.

Darkness. Wet, cold, and deadly.

Bill slowly fell under, surrounded by the laughter of children and something far, far more sinister, but his grip on the paper boat never faltered. The light seeping in from the storm drain blinked…

And then it was gone.


End file.
